the_language_of_new_media_bfandomcom-20200213-history
The Printed Word
Manovich theory of the language of cultural interfaces has three elements that it is made up of and '''the printed word '''is one of them. Printed word is used in different ways today's such as magazines, books and instruction manuals. Manovich feels the printed word is a rectangular page containing one or more columns of text, with graphics and illustrations which can also be framed by text. In the 1980's, as word processing on computers was becoming very common to use, text became the first cultural media to be subjected to digitalise. Lev Manovich feels that text is a massive role in computer culture, as it can be used as a code in which all other media are represented. Some examples of this are coordinates of 3D graphics, pixel values of digital images and the formatting of a page in HTML. Text is also used as communication between a computer and a user, by typing single line commands or running computer programs in a subset of English, and displaying error codes or text messages. An example of the printe d word is a page; a rectangular surface containing a limited amount of information, designed to be accessed in some order, and having a particular relationship to other pages. In 1984, Apple introduced a graphical user interface which presented information in overlapping windows stacked behind one another, like a set of book pages. It gave the user the ability to go back and forth between the pages and to scroll up and down individual pages. In 1987, Apple began to use Hypercard program which extended the different concepts o f the page. After using Hypercard, it allowed users to include media elements within pages and include links between pages regardless of their order. A few years after this, HTML stretched the concept of a page more by locating different parts of a document on different computers connected through a network. In the past, messages written on clay tables were replaced by ink on paper. Ink was then replaced by computer memory, making characters on an electronic screen. Now with HTML, it allows parts of a single page to be located on different computers, the page became even more fluid and unstable. Manovich stated that the development of the page in computer media has also be looked at in a different way, and not as further development but inspired by earlier forms such as the papyrus rolls from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. Scrolling through a computer window or webpage has more in common with unrolling rather than a modern book as the information is not available to look at all at once, but arrives looking from top to bottom like the roll is being unrolled. By the mid 90's, webpages included a variety of media types - graphics, photographs, v ideo, sound and 3D worlds, which were embedded into the pages including texts. To some extent, a typical webpage is similar to a newspaper page which is also dominated by text, with photographs, drawings, tables and graphs embedded in between with links to other pages in the newspaper. While the 1990's web browsers and other commercial cultural interfaces have retained the modern page format, they have also introduced a new way of organising and accessing texts - hyperlinking. It is one text and another text are linked together and the hyperlink leads the user to one of the texts when selected.